What you hold in your hands is the heavy second album by Toronto’s four-piece Bidiniband (cue the excited oooooing!) featuring songwriter and former Rheostatic Dave Bidini (a little less oooooing), heretofore the only Canadian to be nominated for a Juno, Gemini, and Genie Award, as well the country’s national book contest, Canada Reads. This 11 song record is called In the Rock Halland was recorded in six days at Revolution Recording on Laing Street in Toronto by engineer Joe Dunphy. It’s the first rock album made at the city’s new state of the art studio through the sonic magic imparted by its hot-rodded 1974 Neve 8038 console (as if there wasn’t enough pressure). The album was expertly produced by drummer Don Kerr (Ron Sexsmith) and mixed by Michael Phillip-Wojewoda (BNL, Rheostatics) and features Paul Linklater of the Pinecones on guitar and Doug Friesen (John K Samson, Peter Elkas) on bass. The title track was based on the poem “In the Rock Hall” by author Paul Quarrington, and another track, “Eunoia,” draws its lyrics from the epic literary work of the same name by Christian Bok. Otherwise, the band’s Big Rock sounds touch on themes familiar to fans of Bidniband: pirates, war, dating, boating, Smurfs, the 80s, and movie-making. The music on In the Rock Hall was borne out of two years gigging in small clubs across the country, and many of the songs were moulded after live experiments with songs road-tested before they were studio-ready. Mastered by world-reknowned Joao Carvalho, In the Rock Hall is an expressive, white-hot rock and roll statement from one of Canada’s longstanding musical and literary pioneers and counts among his finest work in an artistic life that has already spanned four decades.